3 Buffalo Bill's Defunct

Almost everyone knows "Buffalo Bill's defunct who used to ride a watersmoothsilver stallion" etc.. by E.E. Cummings. I recited this from memory recently at our weekly "poetini" gathering. (Poets drinking martinis.)

2. The Red Wheelbarrow

You all know "The Red Wheelbarrow" by WCW. If you don't have that memorized you shouldn't be allowed to talk about poetry. It's about as long as FGL's "Canción tonta."

Deathbed

They say nobody wishes they had spent more time in the office and less time with family, or on the lake. But does a painter wish she had painted fewer paintings? Does the composer wish he had written fewer string quartets? The poet on her deathbed might ask "Did I do it?" [though that might be more of a male attitude?] In any case, the deathbed regrets are kind of beside the point. What do you want to do now? You have to bumble through life the best way you can.

Both Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch and What Lorca Knew: Fragments of a Late Modernity are studies of Lorca’s influence and reception. The first is narrowly focused on American poetry; the second contains more varied material, including extended close readings of “Play and Theory of the Duende” and “Ode to Walt Whitman.” My third book in this trilogy, Lorca: The Shattered Subject, is an attempt to define the distinctiveness of his own work through a more direct encounter with his poems and plays. I continue to believe that the study of Lorca must be comparative...

365 Poems. 1: "Canción tonta"

I'd like to do this. Each day feature a poem, one that I have memorized. Today, "Canción tonta," by FGL.

It is a dialogue poem, a genre of Lorca's poetry I want to study.

A child asks his mother to be of silver, of water, and the mother says: you will be very cold. Then he says, sew me into your pillow. The mother agrees: "Eso sí, ahora mismo."

What I like about the dialogues is that there is not poetic "I." There are dramatic, but not dramatic monologues. Profacero posted one on her blog recently from Libro de poemas.

There are two rhymes going on: plata / agua / almohada and hijo / frío / mismo.

Very Short Palindrome

¡o!

Personae

1st persons: I / We

Subject positions. Pluralities & collectivities. Autobiography.

2nd persons: You / You plural

Interpellations, invectives, apostrophes, doublings of the 2nd person. Addresses to the audience.

3rd persons: he / it / she / they

Objectifications, escapes from subjectivity (diffused subjectivity). Alienations.


***


Dialogues. Dramatic monologues. Masks.

Dilemma

I want to be a Latin Americanist but Lorca won't let me go.

Solution? I could study Lorca in Latin America, compare him to Latin American poets.

This still would make me more a Lorquista. I can't seem to find a project that's only about Latin American poetry.